January – May, 1995
My two friends, Liz and Liz, of “The Mission” fame, were living up in Bellingham, Washington, training for an all-women’s climb of Denali in Alaska. That winter/spring, I decided to join them, so I hitched a ride with two dread-locked stoner dudes driving an honest-to-goodness classic VW bus. We drove all the way to Washington, stopping to stay with various friends along the way. The dudes sold weed and shrooms at parties to pay for gas. The bus was always full of pot smoke, like Jeff Spicoli’s van in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. Snowboarding was still fairly new (the first Snurfer was made in 1965), and somewhere, we picked up an old school, split tail board with straps for regular boots, and tried it out at some of the tiny ski resorts on the way.
When I finally got to Bellingham, Liz, Liz, and I all lived in a small hotel room at the off season Sudden Valley golf resort. I ate popcorn and drank beer at the bar in exchange for playing a little piano, and Liz and Liz worked very part-time for Pagan Mountaineering (out of business now). We bought most of our climbing gear in Canada because the American dollar was so strong at that time, that it was like getting 40% off. Also visited the fiberglass workshop of a Canadian prison, where they made some mountaineering haul sleds for us, for a very cheap price. Liz and Liz stuck to their Denali training diet of ice cream, beer, and burgers to put on extra calories for the three week climb in Alaska.
For most of the time, we climbed and skied from Northern California up through British Columbia. Including Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Shasta, Mt. Hood, the North Cascades, BC Coast Range, and the Whistler-Blackcomb area. Liz and Liz went to climb Denali in April/May, and I lived in Vancouver for awhile, hiked the 100 mile Wonderland Trail that circumnavigates Mt. Rainier, then traveled around the Olympic Peninsula, hiking and kayaking, sleeping in the truck.
On the way driving back to the East Coast in May, Liz was driving in the middle of the night across a remote area of Idaho, and swerved to avoid a pack of coyotes in the road at about 90 MPH. The truck rolled 3 times and landed upright facing the opposite direction, but we stepped out without a scratch on us. We hitchhiked to Salt Lake City and flew home from there.
